Hodel Blunders as He Squanders

By John B. Oakes; John B. Oakes is former Editor of the Editorial Page of The New York Times.

Published: May 12, 1987

If James G. Watt were still Secretary of the Interior, he couldn't have done much worse than Secretary Donald P. Hodel has done in recent weeks. Except for differences in decibel level, the two have faithfully followed the identical policy of squandering the nation's natural resources for presumed short-term gains.

Mr. Hodel's two most recent violations of his trust are separate but related. The first was to throw open to oil extraction the entire coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in northeastern Alaska, the only place in North America where the complete range of Arctic ecosystems is still preserved intact.

The second, a week later, was Mr. Hodel's decision to open for oil and gas leasing millions of acres of the most environmentally sensitive offshore areas along the Atlantic, Pacific and Alaska coasts.

The Reagan-Watt-Hodel leasing program is not a sensible or orderly method of stretching out America's dwindling supply of this finite energy resource. It is, rather, a self-destroying crash program, as though the nation's life depended on draining America dry of all its oil reserves as quickly as possible.

There are other and better ways of tackling the energy problem, but the Administration shows little interest in them. All of its emphasis is on extraction. None is on the far less costly and far more productive avenues of greater energy efficiency (especially in transportation, housing and manufacturing) and of alternative energy sources (especially solar). The discovery of new oil can hold off for only a few years at most the total depletion within the next several decades of domestic oil resources at present rates of consumption. The facts about the Arctic Refuge are straightforward, but what Mr. Hodel says about them is not. The key area that he would now open to oil exploitation is its huge coastal plain, comprising the only 100 miles of Alaska's 1,100-mile North Coast still fully protected from oil development. It is indispensable terrain for North America's largest herd of caribou, whose annual trek from the Canadian side of the border is one of the world's unique wildlife migrations. A request from the Canadian Government for continued protection of the herd was ignored.

The Arctic coastal plain is also home to an immense variety of other animal and bird life of the tundra whose habitat - and therefore whose existence - would be irretrievably damaged by any kind of industrial incursion into a wilderness as fragile as this. Violation of this land of majestic silence would be an act of spiritual degradation. It should be contemplated only as a last resort.

By the Government's own admission, the chances of finding any oil at all beneath the refuge in commercially exploitable volume are less than one in five. The department's mean estimate of the amount of oil available (on the 19 percent chance that any is available) would only be enough to meet America's energy needs for less than 200 days.

Assistant Secretary William P. Horn speaks glibly of an oilfield potentially the size of neighboring Prudhoe Bay. The respected analyst Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute points out that the overall possibility of such a strike is no more than 1 percent.

To replicate the Prudhoe Bay complex is Mr. Hodel's goal. Prudhoe Bay is producing half as much air pollution as New York City. Water pollution from its oil spillage and toxic chemical waste is spreading out through the flat wetlands of the tundra. Even in the unlikely event that another Prudhoe Bay would in fact be discovered, it would, while it lasted, reduce America's dependence on foreign oil only from 40 to 30 percent.

To enlist native Alaskan support for prospective oil development in the refuge, the Interior Department has been attempting to trade subsurface mineral rights in the area for lands held by native corporations in other parts of Alaska. The cynical idea is to induce the native Alaskan groups to add their pressure to the Government's own strenuous campaign to open the area to oil development, regardless of the effects on native culture and way of life. Not for the first time, the Government is engaged in the dirty business of corrupting native societies for a shabby purpose.

Only Congress can save the situation now. A bill introduced by Morris K. Udall, the House Interior Committee's chairman, will do the job by turning the refuge into an officially designated wilderness area where there can be no mineral or any other kind of exploitation. In 1980, Mr. Udall, a father of the Alaska Lands Act, was forced to compromise on protection of the refuge to secure passage of the basic law. This time around, there can be no compromise. Secretary Hodel again showed his contempt for environmental values when he set a five-year schedule for offshore oil and gas leasing that would threaten some of the most crucially important fishery, wildlife and scenic areas on either coast.

Advertised by the Interior Department as a compromise with environmentalists, this is no compromise at all. If it were, the outcome would have been different in the Bering Sea, for example. One of the world's richest fishing grounds, the sea is also one of the heaviest concentration areas for Alaska's exotic marine mammals and birds. It is up for grabs under the oil and gas leasing program.